Denialism as the word indicate is denying that atrocities happened and/or who committed them, but knowing that atrocities happened and who did it require evidences. So when an anti-communist is accusing us of denialism for pointing out that there is no evidence that communist committed a certain atrocity, what they are saying in essence is that the claim of communists committing the atrocity should be considered ontological true independently of any evidence and are accusing us of denying that ontological truth by refusing to accepting their position that it doesn’t require evidences.

You see this a lot with liberals even outside of that particular subject. Whenever you criticize “too harshly” a politician they like or a narrative important to their worldview, they often respond with “gotchas” that translate too “my theses is obviously the true one and doesn’t need proof and you are an idiot for thinking otherwise”. For example, during the last election whenever all of their arguments were variations of “the Democrats arr the lesser evil” and didn’t bother explaining how or why because to them “the Democrats are less bad than the Republicans” is an obvious truth that doesn’t need to be proven.

Let’s make a comparison between our supposed denialism and actual denialism: The holocaust vs the “holodomor”.

What makes denying the Holocaust denialism? Proofs! We have humongous amounts of evidences that the Holocaust happened: we know why it happened from all the writings in which Hitler and his underlings explained in detail what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it, about the lebensraum, the so called “aryan race”, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories propagated by the Nazis, we know that it happened and how it happened from all the administrative documents tracking the deportations, who was in which train in destination to which camp from where, from the camps and gaz chambers themselves that were thoroughly investigated by the allies after their capture, from the mass graves, belongings and remains found in large quantities, the case is so full bursting with evidences you have to be either a liar or a special kind of ignorant to think it didn’t happen and/or wasn’t on purpose.

On the other hand, in the case of the claim that the Soviets caused the famine on purpose to kill Ukrainians we have nothing of the sort, not even a little bit. We have no internal documents showing that the soviets purposefully withheld grain from Ukraine or explaining why they would even want to do that in the first place, no evidence that the soviet government and anything against the Ukrainians in particular, nothing. Worse! We have evidence that contradict this narrative, administrative documents from the time show that as soon as the soviet government found out about the famine they not only stopped exporting grain out of Ukraine they even started importing grain to Ukraine. On top of that there are inconsistencies in the narrative, most of all in my opinion: the fact that it focuses only on the Ukrainians even though other ethnicity of the USSR were affected by the famine, some even more than the Ukrainians like the Kazakhs. Why is the narrative Ukrainian centric? Because the Holodomor narrative was crafted by the Nazis as a way to justify war against them, and the Nazis being the racists that they are didn’t wanted the “heros” of their narrative to be central asians so they took the most “aryan” of the Slavs (according to them), the Ukrainians. Because that’s the true nature of the Holodomor, it’s a Nazi narrative to demonize communists, and it still is. Have you ever heard or read someone say that the Soviets are worse than the Nazis because of the Holodomor? That’s the intended conclusion. The Holodomor’s purpose is to relativize Nazi horrors and demonize the USSR by making you arrive at the conclusion that the Communists are worst than the Nazis.

It’s just lousy education, OP.

Generic anticommunists acknowledge that the Shoah happened based on substandard education, not by trying to examine all of the overwhelming evidence for it. Consider Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?: aside from showing how Shoah deniers operate (sometimes elevating their deception to the level of a business), it shows that we have plenty of good reasons to consider the Shoah factual, such as hundreds of documents authored by all sorts of people, photographs taken by all sorts of people, camps that we can still visit, inferential evidence (population demographics), proof of intent (e.g. the Wannsee Conference) and eyewitness testimony from a huge variety of people, from ordinary survivors to Sonderkommandos to SS guards to commandants to local townsfolk and even to high‐ranking Axis officials.

By contrast, accusations like the famine–genocide conspiracy theory are based almost entirely on guesswork (similarly to how prosecutors successfully convicted Clayton Johnson of uxoricide), and other accusations like the Uygur genocide conspiracy theory involve a small amount of uncompelling evidence, like umpteen actors eyewitnesses who are coincidentally all tied to a D.C. organization, or several photos that look kinda suspicious, a few confusing videos free of context, and a cultist who pretends to be an expert on the subject. When you compare the Shoah’s overwhelming evidence to the piss-poor evidence for anticommunists’ conspiracy theories, the differences are stark indeed.

Anticommunists who explode at us for not immediately accepting their canards at face-value should not hesitate to believe that the Czechs were committing atrocities against Germans.

Evidence.

Just evidence. If China were to really genocide the Uyghur population I’d be the first to condemn that. Hell, when news broke about it years ago, before I was a commie, I actually did that + I made lengthy efforts to boycott Chinese products because of it. But then I read all this new info on the topic and it changed my mind.

Whether its denialism or not depends on whether the thing bejng denied is true or not. If you deny that the Holocaust happened or that Nazis wanted to genocide the Jews then you are engaging in denialism since you are denying rock solid evidence. If you deny that the Uyghur genocide happened or is happening then it is not denialism because no reputable organisation has ever comfirmed this genocide, nor we know of any Uyghur people that have died in this genocide.

In liberal circles genocide denialism is used as a thought terminating argument. If you deny any alleged genocide then you are engaging in genocide denialism ans therefore you are wrong and bad. It has an effect similar to israel’s mass deployment of anti-semitism allegations. You second guess yourself because you obviously don’t want to go around denying a genocide just as you wouldn’t want to be anti-semetic.

What makes RationalWiki’s debunking of satanic child abuse networks run out of pizza parlors different from denialism? What makes their debunking of any particular alleged outrageous atrocity that the reactionaries invent different from denialism? What makes their refutation of reactionary claims that abortion is mass murder different from denialism?

Truth?

There’s really no difference between Holocaust denial and “holodomor” denial except that one of those things is correct and the other isn’t. Holocaust denial isn’t bad because you’re denying a genocide, it’s bad because you’re denying a genocide that happened and for which there is overwhelming evidence.

If it were wrong to deny any genocide claim, then the perfect attack to make against any political opponent would be an accusation of genocide. You could accuse literally anyone of genocide at any time and if they deny it suddenly they’re the same as a Holocaust denier. Obviously that’s absurd and invalid.

As others have said, it’s simply a matter of truth and evidence.

Good book on the topic - Atrocity Fabrication and its Consequences (pdf link)

https://ia600302.us.archive.org/1/items/abrams-atrocity-fabrications/Abrams_AtrocityFab.pdf

m.youtube.com/watch?v=FuE2CDRcfTQ